The Best Bioengineering Books of All Time

Just 45 years ago, the age of gene modification was born. Researchers could create glow-in-the-dark mice, farmyard animals producing drugs in their milk, and vitamin-enhanced rice that could prevent half a million people going blind every year. But now GM is rapidly being supplanted by a new system called CRISPR or ‘gene editing’. Using this approach, scientists can manipulate the genes of almost any organism with a degree of precision, ease and speed that we could only dream of ten years ago. But is it ethical to change the genetic material of organisms in a way that might be passed on to future generations?

If a person is suffering from a lethal genetic disease, is it even more unethical to deny them this option? Who controls the application of this technology, when it makes ‘biohacking’—perhaps of one’s own genome—a real possibility? Nessa Carey’s book is a thrilling and timely snapshot of a technology that will radically alter our futures.

This book uncovers the biggest scientific fraud of our age. It tells the fascinating and frequently astounding story of how the massive enterprise to restructure the genetic core of the world's food supply came into being, how it advanced by consistently violating the protocols of science, and how for more than three decades, hundreds of eminent biologists and esteemed institutions have systematically contorted the truth in order to conceal the unique risks of its products–and get them onto our dinner plates.

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth provides a graphic account of how this elaborate fraud was crafted and how it not only deceived the general public, but Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and a host of other astute and influential individuals as well. The book also exposes how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was induced to become a key accomplice--and how it has broken the law and repeatedly lied in order to usher genetically engineered foods onto the market without the safety testing that's required by federal statute. As a result, for fifteen years America's families have been regularly ingesting a group of novel products that the FDA's own scientific staff had previously determined to be unduly hazardous to human health. By the time this gripping story comes to a close, it will be clear that the degradation of science it documents has not only been unsavory but unprecedented--and that in no other instance have so many scientists so seriously subverted the standards they were trained to uphold, misled so many people, and imposed such magnitude of risk on both human health and the health of the environment.

The Leading Introduction to Biochemical and Bioprocess Engineering, Updated with Key Advances in Productivity, Innovation, and Safety. Bioprocess Engineering, Third Edition, is an extensive update of the world’s leading introductory textbook on biochemical and bioprocess engineering and reflects key advances in productivity, innovation, and safety. The authors review relevant fundamentals of biochemistry, microbiology, and molecular biology, including enzymes, cell functions and growth, major metabolic pathways, alteration of cellular information, and other key topics.

They then introduce evolving biological tools for manipulating cell biology more effectively and to reduce costs of bioprocesses. This edition presents major advances in the production of biologicals; highly productive techniques for making heterologous proteins; new commercial applications for both animal and plant cell cultures; key improvements in recombinant DNA microbe engineering; techniques for more consistent authentic post-translational processing of proteins; and other advanced topics. It includes new, improved, or expanded coverage of. The role of small RNAs as regulatorsTranscription, translation, regulation, and differences between prokaryotes and eukaryotesCell-free processes, metabolic engineering, and protein engineeringBiofuels and energy, including coordinated enzyme systems, mixed-inhibition and enzyme-activation kinetics, and two-phase enzymatic reactionsSynthetic biologyThe growing role of genomics and epigenomics Population balances and the Gompetz equation for batch growth and product formationMicroreactors for scale-up/scale-down, including rapid scale-up of vaccine productionThe development of single-use technology in bioprocessesStem cell technology and utilizationUse of microfabrication, nanobiotechnology, and 3D printing techniquesAdvances in animal and plant cell biotechnologyThe text makes extensive use of illustrations, examples, and problems, and contains references for further reading as well as a detailed appendix describing traditional bioprocesses.